Quotes About Religion

Whenever a new Christian comes into the church, I wince a bit, because I'm afraid that they will get the "religion disease," that the "church virus" will kill off the joy and freedom Jesus purchased on the cross to give them.

Forgiveness is at the very heart of the Christian faith. It's not about getting better, becoming more religious, or following the rules so God will love you. It's all about forgiveness, dummy! Everything else is secondary. If we don't keep the main thing the main thing, then everything else will turn sour on us.

There really is something neurotic about Christians who spend most of their time trying desperately to please a God who is already very pleased. They don't have any freedom, and they sometimes take away the freedom of others.

Clinging to any entity—including self, other, cat, or God—puts us into a conceptual prison. This is true of all beliefs, all grasped concepts. They all obstruct true Religious Experience—direct experience of Reality.

In short, science is well positioned to properly handle belief. Religion is not.

religion is about seeing or experiencing Truth—not about holding a set of beliefs. Religio comes out of our deeply felt desire to get back to Truth. We don't want to be deceived.

I usually call these endless discussions "religious debates," because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can't be proven—supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something important

Evangelicals believe they are saved by grace through faith but then add a man-made waiver that you have to work as hard as you can can meet middle-class behavioral patterns to hang onto it.

I don't like the new president who hunts muslim extremists, I like the old president who is a muslim extremist.

It is understandable, therefore, that the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. The core belief is that humankind inherited a pristine Eden, has sinned greatly by polluting it, and must now suffer lest we all perish in a fiery apocalypse.

Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

as Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson later noted,1 "in all probability . . . hocus pocus is nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus ("this is the body"), [a] ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church.

When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple.

No one can claim their particular vision of the divine as correct, if there are thousands of other 'visions' with which to compare it. And anyone who does try to claim the spotlight? Even a few decades ago, they could have started a cult. These days, they'll just get trolled online, then ignored.

Hallucinogens then do the same job as religion - they provide proof of unity, which is still the only known cure for fear of death.

As Montesquieu wrote, "If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.") For

Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. —George Carlin

Though the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote.

A medida que los países se vuelven más inteligentes, se alejan de Dios.

What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?

The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38